Jerry’s tale then, and America’s story now

Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators blocked access to the Oakland Induction Center at Clay and 15th streets in Oakland on Dec. 18, 1967.

Anti-Vietnam War demonstrators blocked access to the Oakland Induction Center at Clay and 15th streets in Oakland on Dec. 18, 1967.

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Police for two lines to enable the inductees to pass between the anti-war demonstrator sits in the street blocking access to the Oakland Induction Center , October 16, 1967 Vietnam War protesters Associated Press less

Police for two lines to enable the inductees to pass between the anti-war demonstrator sits in the street blocking access to the Oakland Induction Center , October 16, 1967 Vietnam War protesters Associated ... more

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Jerry Garchik, working as a law clerk in the Boston office of the lawyers defending him, 1970 Handout

Jerry Garchik, working as a law clerk in the Boston office of the lawyers defending him, 1970 Handout

It is Jerry’s story, not mine. It was his life that was disrupted, his progress that was halted, his future that was threatened. But this year, spurred by accounts in Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” 18-hour documentary series, which airs next Sunday, I am remembering, wading through a muck of memories almost 50 years old.

When Jerry and I met on July 2, 1966, a year after he had earned an undergraduate degree in engineering from Cooper Union, he was midway through getting a master’s degree in industrial administration at Yale University. I’d just graduated from Brooklyn College. Probably the strongest thing we shared was the feeling of most educated young people who’d grown up in pre-hip Brooklyn — that the action, the sophistication, lay across the East River.

We’d both lived at home when we went to college, spending any spare time earning pin money with menial after-school and summer jobs. Having spent a great deal of time on the subway commuting to school and work, our most profound goal was to take the subway to Manhattan and stay there, never again having to slink back to Brooklyn to sleep.

We envisioned stepping up to become the kinds of adults we read about in the New Yorker: We would study hard and work hard, and that would enable us to pull ourselves out of our second-rate native soil and replant ourselves in headier gardens: concert halls, theaters, art galleries, cocktail parties in brownstones.

A year later, our courtship continued; Jerry got his degree, got into Harvard Law, and moved to Cambridge, Mass. We married a year after that, in August 1968. The Vietnam War was raging; chatting with Jerry before the ceremony, the rabbi asked about the groom’s draft status.

This was six months after TV news anchor Walter Cronkite’s condemnation of the war, said now to be the turning point of public opinion. And three months after the then-beloved child-rearing guru Dr. Benjamin Spock went on trial for encouraging young men to refuse the draft.

But Jerry was neither protester nor draft-card burner. His energy was focused on getting ahead through the establishment. Growing a mustache was his big rebellious act. We didn’t watch the war on television, because we’d decided not to own a television set.

Everywhere in the country, unrest was simmering. Although it was inconceivable to us that Jerry could be drafted and shipped out to Vietnam — we were smug enough to think we’d find protection somehow — we started to feel the heat. In Cambridge, the demonstrations became angrier. Where anyone stood on the issue those days was a litmus test, we thought, as we became angry, too, and we both marched. The war seemed useless, immoral ... and our personal plans didn’t include warfare.

We honeymooned in Nova Scotia, and when we returned, Jerry resumed classes and I got a job as a secretary. We read in newspapers about the chaos at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, about the mass arrests — even of journalists — and police set loose on crowds of protesters. In the wake of that convention, the Chicago Eight — later Seven, when Bobby Seale’s case was separated — were tried in federal court for conspiracy, inciting to riot and other charges related to anti-Vietnam War protests.

But we were halfway across the country, we never called anyone a “pig,” and we tried to tell ourselves the war was far away. I didn’t know anyone who’d gone to Vietnam. Friends who had progressed straight from undergrad to law school had deferments; friends studying medicine had made deals to work for the Army; some joined the National Guard; many became teachers. Most of our friends had draft deferments, and if they didn’t, they quit whatever they were doing and raced for cover under one of the professional umbrellas.

There was a deferment for married couples who had children. Men like Jerry, who weren’t fathers, were vulnerable. Graduate students who’d enrolled just after college were deferred, but it was unclear whether Jerry’s three-step academic path would protect him.

When we read news reports that Gen. William Westmoreland was asking for additional troops, the shadow of possibilities darkened. A few months after we married, Jerry was summoned by his draft board in Coney Island.

We’d driven down from Cambridge for a nighttime meeting. There was a long table and a dangling overhead light, a stage set something like an interrogation scene in a bad movie. Jerry talked about his schooling.

The men — all the draft board members were men — weren’t much interested. What I remember was their conclusion, as expressed by one board member: “We’re going to get you, Garchik. You think you’re up there in your ivory tower, but we’re going to get you.” They turned down his deferment request.

Like so many of his classmates — only half his law school class graduated on time — Jerry quit to get a job that was deferrable. He was able to use computer skills acquired at Yale to get a job at the Mitre Corp., where every employee of draft age had a deferment. His draft board turned down his request for deferment.

“Don’t get into trouble,” his parents said. It was an understated caution. There was “trouble” in going to war, and there was “trouble” in not going. He turned to draft counselors at the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors. I quit my secretarial job and took a legal secretary’s job at a firm of what were then called “radical lawyers” who were defending many draft resisters; Jerry clerked there to pay his lawyer’s bill.

Jerry returned to law school and applied to be a conscientious objector. That request was turned down, too. Called to a physical, he passed it and was classified 1-A, fit and available for military service. A few months later, he received a draft notice and was ordered to report to the Boston Army Base at 6 a.m. on a specific date.

I don’t remember that we spent a long time discussing what he would do that day. Jerry has always told people that I was influential in the decision, that I wouldn’t allow him to go. Perhaps more to the point, our everyday work in the law office was helping other people to avoid the draft. One man said he had a disease of the hand that wouldn’t allow him to pull a trigger. Another man had “f— the army” tattooed along the outside of the little finger of his saluting hand. It was well known that people got out by feigning homosexuality or mental imbalance, doping themselves in preparation for physicals, starving themselves so as to be underweight.

These methods were unthinkable to Jerry.

It was dark when we got up on the day he was to report. We made our way to the induction center, a large square building surrounded by a plaza. There was a waiting room inside, and a few benches outside on the pier jutting into Boston Harbor. I told Jerry I wouldn’t leave until he got out.

The hours dragged by with people coming and going. I remember overhearing conversations among the families of young people who were to be sworn in and sent off to basic training. I sure wasn’t going to discuss with anyone that my husband was going to refuse, so I talked to no one.

It was late afternoon by the time Jerry emerged. He’d had another physical, he said, and passed it. And then he was sent to take his place standing in a room full of draftees. They were asked to step forward, an action that would serve as formal induction. He didn’t.

Did he understand the consequence of what he was doing? he was asked. Yes, he said. He was taken to a higher-ranking officer, who repeated the direction and warned that he was committing a felony, then to someone even higher.

We knew he wasn’t alone. There were many young men refusing to go, David Harris probably the most famous. Although public opinion was divided, going was unthinkable; refusing to go felt honorable. But committing a felony sure wasn’t part of the strivers’ vision we’d shared.

We tried to plan what we would do if the sword hanging over our heads fell. We had talked about going to Canada. But the only move we made was a car trip there, where, when we couldn’t find a hotel room, we crashed with a couple of draft resisters living in Montreal.

Back in Cambridge, we waited, hoping nothing would happen. Results of the draft lottery were announced, and Jerry had a terrible number. But it didn’t matter. He’d already been drafted.

There were so many young men resisting the draft — more than 200,000 during the course of the war, the resistance movement said — that for two years, the Harvard Crimson reported, no one was indicted for refusing induction in Massachusetts. My parents told us that the FBI had come to their house in Brooklyn, asking them whether Jerry had engaged in subversive activities and even interviewing their neighbors. As parents, they always worried about everything, and I’m sure this was a huge weight on them. But if they disapproved, they did not tell us.

My father did say that during World War II, when polio had prevented him from enlisting, he had once refused a spot on a draft board, because he didn’t want to be the person who decided who would risk being killed and who would not. I took that — understanding the weight of the consequences of fighting — as an expression of support.

But when we traveled to New York for a family gathering, one of my beloved uncles cleared his throat and said, in a speech that sounded as though he’d rehearsed it for days, “I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble with the draft, Jerry. But I think it’s every man’s responsibility to serve his country.”

On Sept. 10, 1970, a year or so after he refused induction, a copy of a federal indictment was mailed to our apartment in Cambridge. It was one of 25 such indictments handed down that day; hundreds had refused to go. The original indictment had been mailed to an address in Toronto, where we’d never been, and another copy was sent to Jerry at my parents’ house.

His case was assigned to Judge Arthur Garrity, who would become famous — and a hero to progressives — a few years later for having ordered school desegregation in Boston. The lawyers we worked for said he was called “Hanging Garrity” for the severity of the sentences he doled out to draft dodgers.

Jerry’s case was being prosecuted by an assistant U.S. attorney named George Higgins, who later wrote “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” a best-seller about Boston gangsters. I always wondered whether he’d enjoyed prosecuting such cases. But years later, when he came to The Chronicle on a book tour, I told him — with a smile plastered on my face — that I had once sat in a Boston courtroom and stared at the back of his head and wished him nothing good.

The “radical lawyers” threw everything they had into their arguments. The war, undeclared by Congress, violated international law, they said; the Boston grand jury that handed down the indictment was not representative of the population, they said; the Selective Service Act of 1967 was unconstitutional because it discriminated against women, they said.

Ultimately, however, it wasn’t any high-flown constitutional argument that prevailed. I was at my desk when someone from the prosecutor’s office called Harvey Silverglate, who was both my boss and my husband’s lawyer. In the next room, I could hear his victory whoop. In considering each request for deferment, the draft board was supposed to have done a bureaucratic minuet of several steps, hearings, pleadings, etc. In Jerry’s case, it had missed one. It meant the case would be dropped.

Jerry was just turning 27, too old to be drafted. He finished law school; we came to California, found work, raised a family. When the subject came up, our kids didn’t seem much interested or impressed in the dramatic event that had shaped their parents’ early years. That their parents faced a life-or-death dilemma simply was inconceivable.

I recently watched a DVD of the Burns series on the Vietnam War, considering every soldier’s recollections, every family’s tale, against a backdrop of our experience. The fighters did noble things: standing up for what they believed, backing up their buddies, challenging themselves to participate in the most ferocious fighting.

The narration cites a year, 1965, perhaps, when the basis of draft resistance turned from pacifist and/or political principle to self-protective instinct. The documentary implies that the latter is a less admirable instinct.

But maybe Jerry’s story is about caring for one’s own life as a first step. Caring about someone else’s follows, and that’s noble enough.